WordPress recently launched a new front-end theme called P2, which affords a standard WP setup Tumblr and Twitter-like capabilities, with all the privacy nuances that you would expect: you can specify posts get shown to certain sets of users, show some things to everyone, and allow anyone to participate in conversations asynchronously.

The short-lived but annoying explosion of Spymaster makes this all the more relevant. I’m increasingly feeling like Twitter will be the Friendster of Microblogging: it’s getting huge/slow and it’s not changing in a meaningful way despite many major deficiencies. But then, why would it? Why worry about change when you’ve got to keep the whole site from failing?

I’ve been saying this for a while, but never quite so publicly: the important thing about Twitter is not Twitter itself, but rather the mass adoption of this kind of web behavior. And the spread of features across sites that allow for instantaneous discussion (which is distinct from commenting behavior, at least in my head) seems to herald a pretty significant societal shift that crosses generations and levels of technical sophistication.

Comments

What’s the trend of the tool begetting a movement? Friendster and Myspace bred the glut of social networks and sparked an adoption of the behaviors we exhibit to this day: living in public.

But it seems as though we’ve passed an invisible line in time… when a major utility shaped behavior. Now we’re seeing behaviors set by many emerging and small properties. Or maybe it’s simply a shift toward many small single purpose sites and away from these behemoths – as if we had a carrot big enough to entice users into another social network.